Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras da UEMASUL – PPGLe

Tag: Research

  • Can Laughter Make Our Lives Better? Researchers Say Yes

    Can Laughter Make Our Lives Better? Researchers Say Yes

    Research from the UA’s Eller College of Management suggests that humor is a good thing in certain situations, but its effectiveness depends on your end goal.

    Why do humorous dating profiles get more right swipes? Can being funny help solve problems? Is laughter really the best medicine?

    Humor and the “good life” seem to go hand-in-hand. Funny people seem to move effortlessly through the world. Business articles and gurus prescribe humor as a key to effective workplace performance. The website for the African country of Eritrea even describes humor as “a tremendous resource for surmounting problems, enhancing your relationships, and supporting both physical and emotional health.”

    “Humor, Comedy and Consumer Behavior,” a paper by Caleb Warren, assistant professor of marketing in the UA Eller College of Management; Adam Barsky of the University of Melbourne; and A. Peter McGraw of the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, looks beyond advertising to highlight how and when humor helps people reach their goals.

    The paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research, breaks people’s goals into three broad categories: hedonic goals (maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain), utilitarian goals (optimizing long-term well-being) and social goals (getting along with others). The researchers integrate insights from psychology, management, linguistics, anthropology, medicine and neuroscience to propose a framework that summarizes the current scientific knowledge about humor.

    The authors argue that humor appreciation (laughter and amusement) helps people feel better by making positive experiences, such as watching a movie or dining at a restaurant, more pleasant — and negative experiences, such as going for dental work or waiting in line, less unpleasant. Sharing a laugh also can help people bond and get along better.

    But humor appreciation does not always improve utilitarian outcomes, such as decision-making or health. For example, laughing tends to make people more creative — but also more careless. Similarly, watching a funny movie may help someone recover from emotional ailments, such as depression or an anxiety disorder, but there is little evidence that humor will help with cancer or even a common cold.

    Similarly, comedy production (trying to make others laugh) sometimes helps people reach their goals but other times gets in the way. For example, cracking a joke can help people capture attention, but it also can make a message seem less important.

    One notable conclusion from the paper is that the effects of comedy production depend on the type of joke people tell, as well as whether the joke actually makes an audience laugh. Teasing and telling insulting jokes are less likely to help people cope with loss or navigate an awkward social interaction than joking about the weather or creating an amusing pun. But even jokes about the weather and puns won’t help if no one laughs.

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  • Chickens ‘closer to dinosaurs’ than other birds

    Chickens ‘closer to dinosaurs’ than other birds

    New research suggests that chickens have experienced fewer gross genomic changes than other birds as they evolved from their dinosaur ancestor.

    Professor Darren Griffin and a team at the University’s School of Biosciences have conducted research that suggests that chromosomes of the chicken and turkey lineage have undergone the fewest number of changes compared to their ancient avian ancestor, thought to be a feathered dinosaur.

    The Kent research is part of a study by a consortium of leading scientists into avian or bird genomes, which tell a story of species evolution. The living descendants of dinosaurs were thought to have undergone a rapid burst of evolution after most dinosaur species were wiped out. The detailed family tree of modern birds has however confused biologists for centuries and the molecular details of how birds arrived at the spectacular biodiversity of more than 10,000 species is barely known.

    Professor Griffin explained that bird genomes are distinctive in that they have more tiny microchromosomes than any other vertebrate group. These small packages of gene-rich material are thought to have been present in their dinosaur ancestors. The team found that the chicken has the most similar overall chromosome pattern to its avian dinosaur ancestor.

    The research, which formed part of a vast study carried out over the past four years by the international Avian Phylogenomics Consortium, involved the analysis of the whole genome structure of the chicken, turkey, Pekin duck, zebra finch and budgerigar.

    Professor Griffin and the other leaders of the research team ¬- Kent colleague Dr Michael Romanov as well as Dr Denis Larkin and Dr Marta Farré from the Royal Veterinary College, University of London – studied data from a total of 21 avian genomes and one reptile species. The team focused on the six best-assembled genomes to put together a karyotype s– organised profile – of the dinosaur ancestor for each chromosome.

    The researchers also found that the fastest rate of change had occurred in the zebra finch and budgerigar, consistent with more rapid speciation events in songbirds and their relatives.

    The research paper, entitled Reconstruction of gross avian genome structure, organization and evolution suggests that the chicken lineage most closely resembles the dinosaur avian ancestor, is published in the open access journal BMC Genomics.

    Further information from Professor Griffin.

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  • University Biologists Find Answer to 100-Year-Old Question

    University Biologists Find Answer to 100-Year-Old Question

    University of Arizona biology researchers have made a discovery that helps resolve a conundrum that has puzzled scientists for more than a century.

    The UA team, headed by Michael S. Barker, assistant professor and director of bioinformatics in the UA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has found that polyploidy, the duplication of whole genomes, has occurred many times during the evolution of insects, the most diverse group of animals.

    Evolutionary biologists long have known that genome duplication was a common part of the evolution of plants, and Barker specializes in methods to detect the history of polyploidy in their genomes. 

    “We know that plants like kale, broccoli, cabbage, turnips, cauliflower, sunflower, soybeans, rice, corn, wheat — all those things that we eat and more — have all experienced polyploidy in their ancestry. We know these plants have done this a lot and we can see this in their genomes,” Barker says.

    Until now, there had been no evidence for this mechanism of genome evolution in insects, and scientists have been mystified as to why plants and animals have evolved so differently.

    Scientists already were studying genetic mutations and chromosomes in the late 1800s. By the 1930s, it was clear that many plants had doubled sets of chromosomes, but this appeared to be very rare in animals.

    The famous evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky observed in 1937 that the biggest difference between the evolution of plants and animals may be polyploidy. The reasons for this difference have eluded biologists over the last century, but new analyses of genomes are revealing ancient duplications in places that Dobzhanksy and his contemporaries could not see.

    Barker and his team created their own bioinformatics program to measure and characterize gene duplications in the insects, just as they do in plants. They found evidence of 18 putative “whole genome duplications” and at least six other “bursts” of gene duplication that occurred during the evolution of insects. The team includes three undergraduate students and a fifth-year graduate student, Zheng Li, who are co-authors on their paper, which has just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigious scientific publication. 

    “When Li first approached me about analyzing insect data, I thought, ‘Sure, let’s do it, but we probably won’t find anything because sequenced insect genomes did not appear to have been duplicated, unlike the first plant genomes,’” Barker says.

    “Yet our analyses found the same genomic signatures of polyploidy in insects that we have observed in many plants. In the historical context of work on polyploidy, even from the plant perspective, this was shocking.

    “We care about where novelty and innovation come from in organisms,” he says. “Our results tell us that many of the models and hypotheses about novelty and polyploidy, developed from the study of plants, fungi and other organisms, may now apply to insects.”

    Given that insects are one of the most successful and diverse groups of animals, it is exciting to have a new perspective to think about how that diversity may have evolved, Barker adds. 

    “And so now we need to figure out what are the consequences,” he says. “What are these genes doing? How are they different from other kinds of (genetic) duplicates? And that is work that we are actively pursuing.”

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